It's interesting to see UK-based influencers all citing these weak studies (internet surveys) about how social media is not so bad for children, or bemoaning the huge loss for children whose access to educational videos will be cut.

While the financial motive is clear, they must all believe it to an extent, because social media made their careers and changed their lives.

The reality is that the vast majority of kids aren't interested in learning video editing or movie directing, they are mindlessly consuming AI-generated videos and similar content served to them. 30-second videos on random facts sprinkled here and there aren't education.

Not that I think this ban will help, but downplaying the harm to children is a bit too much coming from people with ties to these platforms, like the author of this article.

The point is. I’ve heard all of this before. Does anyone else remember being 15 and having every adult nearby tell you that staring at a screen for 6 hours a day is going to destroy my eyes and my life? I can tell you it’s worked out pretty well for me.

Of course I agree the pointless AI generated shit is a massive waste of time, but it doesn’t really matter what it actually is as long as it allows them to connect over a shared thing. I think it’s far more important we ensure there’s spaces for kids to meet that are not purely digital.

I had a kind of social media when I was a teenager. It mostly involved dialing into a BBS or two, and its easy to think that it was harmless because it was a positive thing for me, but even I have to admit that there were dangers and even though those online places were similar they were also very different. Social media platforms are designed to be harmful in ways that a BBS just wasn't. There were no algorithms trained on data collected from multiple sources and focused on driving endless engagement. There were no people being paid to pretend to be regular users in order to secretly push products on me. There were games, including some that some parents would probably find objectionable, but they didn't constantly nag at me to buy things with real money (or virtual currency that could only be reasonably obtained with real money), and corporations didn't populate those games with brand ambassadors and ads.

It's too easy to look back and think "I survived online", but what adults today experienced online as kids is very different from what exists online for kids today. It's not just parents who are saying so. The social media platform's own research shows that it's harmful.

Yes, absolutely. But those people exist now, and you need to know how to deal with them because they're going to be a fact of your life going forward. The LLM's are going to tell you nonsense and pretend its the pure truth. The people you meet online are going to be mostly benign but interspersed with a few genuinely bad apples. You don't want all of that dumped on you at eighteen when you are apparently suddenly not a child any more.

I think it's much useful to teach kids early rather than late.

>> The reality is that the vast majority of kids aren't interested in learning video editing or movie directing

Also the idea that they can't do these things without social media or YouTube is absurd. The people actually interested in learning something new will go down even deeper rabbit holes, try things themselves, and come out better than they would have following some YouTube tutorials.

It's not that people can't learn something from youtube, but that's not where most of people (not just the children) are spending most of the time. Just because someone watches a few videos about something useful to them that doesn't mean they aren't also being exposed to things that are harmful to them.

There are a lot of benefits to social media, and it could be a positive thing with fewer downsides, but there are basically no regulations to stop platforms from exploiting and harming children. The industry also refuses to regulate itself and prevent harms (many of which they created/cause in the first place). Parents clearly need to do a better job protecting their kids, but I have to admit that it's difficult when their children are being targeted and manipulated by companies with trillions of dollars while parents have to spend most of their time working just to keep their kids housed and fed.

> I'm sure that 13 year olds who don't get enough sleep because they're endlessly scrolling through ads, influencers, and disinformation

I didn't get sleep as a teenager because I read books. Should we ban those too?

If books were collecting every scrap of data they could on you, and every new page you turned to was algorithmically changed using data collected from your reading history and from additional information purchased from data brokers, and the words and pictures were being used to manipulate you and encourage you to engage in harmful actions ranging from sending the publisher nudes to killing yourself then yes, we should probably have some kind of regulations on when and how children use those books. Facebook's own internal research shows that their platform is harmful to children. We don't need to depend on opinions of child victims.

It would be equally disingenuous to not ask children what they think, we already marginalize childrens views and ideas and they often suffer under restrictive laws because they can't effectively fight any legislation or legal rulings.